Lovely Naked Laziness

I recently came across a Pablo Neruda poem (Keeping Quiet) while on a meditation retreat that made me want more Neruda. I’d never really delved into his work, so after the retreat I got a big fat collected poetry volume

I decided I would use Neruda’s volume to both soak in the poetry and to prompt my own writing. Pick a page at random, read a poem several times, pick a few words from it to serve as a prompt.

The very first time I did it with this volume, setting the book down on the table with a small thump to let it fall open, the “Ode to Laziness” appeared.

The poet is supposed to be working, supposed to be doing his poetry job and writing an ode. But the inspiration is not showing up.

     Yesterday I felt as if my ode
      was never going to sprout.
      At least it should have been showing
      a green leaf. 

And then, Neruda tells us, ‘lovely naked laziness’ reveals herself.

    Then,
    high amid the pines,
    I saw lovely
    naked laziness,
    she led me off bedazzled
    and bemused

She is sun and fog, pebbles and oceans, cormorants and petrels. When the poet gets ready for bed that night, sand spills out of his shoes and he falls fast asleep.

This if the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether “coincidence” is actually a message, a clue-stick, a miracle by another name. The news that shows up when we most need to hear it and are also able to hear it. That book of poems knew I needed to sink into the necessity and joy of laziness. The counterpoint to a career of effort and striving and action-oriented bla-bla-bla, the career I left behind two months ago for a pension and an opening and this empty page.

At the time I opened this book I had been at a cottage for two weeks, sitting on the deck listening to cormorants honk like pigs every day (seriously, cormorants make weird loud noises), starting my retirement with a visit to family and the salt water I have always found restorative.

Laziness was the problem, the enemy, the thing I berated myself for constantly. I have been working to grow gentleness and self-compassion in recent years, mostly because I had no choice. I could not continue the way I had been going. I have worked on re-framing what I called laziness: rest, restoration, renewal, time I needed, filling the well. But the word laziness itself remains touchy, a slur. A moral failing.

So Neruda’s Ode to Laziness reveals itself to me, and I contemplate. There can be good laziness, right laziness. This virtuous laziness (yes, I know I know, I’ll break down this ugly binary later) involves nature, sensation, feeling true things, presence even if not action, spirit even if not production.

But there’s still a bad kind of lazy, , that immoral lazy, which is avoidance, that compulsive distraction, pushing away sensation and pushing down feelings, seeking the soothing babble of meaningless words and images.

The specific kind of laziness I am contemplating and labelling “bad” is nothing Neruda ever participated in or could have conceived of during his lifetime: the doomscrolling and meme-seeking of social media and smart phones. We stare at a light-filled square in our palms, the size of a photograph with more computing capacity than the first rocket to the moon, eyes and brains glazed over with cat videos and porn, celebrities and influencers, thumbs flicking up, down, left, right, doomscrolling into our future.

I read a substack piece recently that laid out the evidence of how our minds, our culture, our conversations, our youth are being transformed. Our very capacity for attention and awareness might be diminishing. It is certainly changing. Some might call it evolving. It feels both irresistible and awful as I am sucked down and down into the Insta and the facebook and the substack note and the games, the goddamn games. I try to resist with blocking apps and time limits but there are work-arounds and I use them. I see the angst and the concern in the think pieces but I don’t see the solutions.

Lovely naked laziness, though. The lovely part is important. Maybe so is the naked part. The vast majority of that online world is neither lovely nor naked (well, okay, the porn is probably literally naked but I’m being poetic and figurative here).

Lovely naked laziness that isn’t avoidance but is presence. That’s the kind of laziness to seek, to rest in. It might still be procrastination of a kind, but it’s not the compulsive grasping for the “click ahhhh” satisfaction of a like, a reaction, a snerk, a comment. It is the laziness of seeing, of being, not the craving for attention, for reaction.

And and and. I will not shame anyone, I will not shame myself, for the grasping laziness. Shame and judgment do not move me, do not help me. Shame and judgment just curl me up tighter, make me cling harder, increase the urge to cover up and hide with more of the same, more distraction.

Come back around to the lovely naked laziness. The simple, unadorned, passive taking in of the world. But that word “passive” strikes the exact same clang of dissonance as “lazy” does. I judge that word passive, I might judge it even harder than I do lazy. I was once accused of being passive by my ex, telling her a story of a work conflict I was struggling with. “You’re so passive” she exploded. I, of course, went silent and passive in response, unable to argue, paralyzed and stunned. I’m not passive, I later was able to say (to myself, not to her, we broke up not long after). I am thoughtful, careful, deliberate, non-reactive.

Yeah, passive is loaded, heavy, a word with baggage. Maybe it needs reclaiming, like laziness. But not today, Neruda’s words in this poem do not include passive. I’ll leave it at lovely naked laziness for today.

P.S. Mary Oliver might have already said this all so very much better. The link is an article about an Oliver essay, not a poem. But Oliver’s poems are absolutely odes to laziness.